Lehigh County soldier was hanged for murder in World War II

Werner E. Schmiedel, from Breinigsville, was a U.S. Army deserter during World War II who, under the alias Robert Lane, led a mob of deserters on a crime spree.

Werner E. Schmiedel, from Breinigsville, was a U.S. Army deserter during World War II who, under the alias Robert Lane, led a mob of deserters on a crime spree. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS AD, CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

David VendittaOf The Morning Call

Werner Schmiedel of Breinigsville was better known as gangster Robert Lane

A Pennsylvania farm boy racked up a World War II record few other soldiers could match — as the leader of a marauding gang of American and Canadian army deserters.

Werner Schmiedel of Weisenberg Township lurked in the Roman underworld and prowled the roads south of the city with his minions, robbing civilians and Allied soldiers in a reign of fear lasting several months in 1944. In one holdup, they carjacked a Polish general's Cadillac. In another, Schmiedel shot an Italian man to death in a wine shop — the crime that sealed his fate.

A big talker, he bragged he was "public enemy No. 1." Newspaper stories had him stealing as much as $1,000 a day and giving lavish gifts to prostitutes. Military authorities knew him by his alias, Robert Lane, boss of the notorious Lane Gang, and noted he often posed as a military policeman.

"He was a cunning, street-smart guy who could size up his environment and figure out how he could pull one over on the Army or enhance his own personal standing," said French MacLean, a retired Army colonel who wrote a book about World War II soldier-criminals. "He was probably the toughest guy in the gang."

Even after the military police had thrown Schmiedel behind bars for robbery and murder, he slipped through their grasp in gangland fashion with a wild Christmas Eve jailbreak. But he wasn't on the lam for long. In a highly publicized court-martial early in 1945, he was convicted and sentenced to pay with his life. His father wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt in hopes the president would spare his wayward son, to no avail.

Documents and photos pertaining to the case of Werner Schmiedel of Weisenberg, Lehigh County, who led a gang of deserters in Italy's underworld during World War II. Schmiedel was hanged for the crimes he committed in 1945.

(The Morning Call)

The execution of Pvt. Schmiedel would wait until the war against Nazi Germany ended. In June, a month after victory in Europe, the 22-year-old thug was led to the gallows at a U.S. Army stockade near Naples, Italy, to hang.

He had never faced the enemy in combat. His five years in the Army had stood out as one long parade of lies, arrogance and bullying. Habitually absent without leave even while training in the States, he re-enlisted after one disappearance under a different first name, posing as his own make-believe brother. It took the FBI to undo the confusion.

It has been 70 years since Schmiedel died for his crimes at the end of a rope. In the late spring of 1945, the news of his execution caused barely a ripple in the Lehigh Valley, where communities marked Germany's defeat with prayers and gratitude, and steeled themselves to finish the fight against Japan. In March, The Evening Chronicle of Allentown screamed in a three-column headline, "Lehigh Soldier Sentenced To Death for Murder in Italian Wine Shop Robbery." But when the sentence was carried out in June, the newspaper ran only three paragraphs.

GRAPHIC: Werner Schmiedel crime spree

Schmiedel was one of only four soldiers from Pennsylvania — and 96 from across the nation — executed by the U.S. Army in Europe and North Africa during World War II. His long rap sheet of sordid deeds puts him, in MacLean's estimation, in the top 15 worst offenders. To tell Schmiedel's tale, The Morning Call obtained his military personnel file and the records of his court-martial from the National Archives at St. Louis.

A false identity

The seeds of Schmiedel's unruly behavior grew out of his boyhood on the family farm 2 miles west of Fogelsville. He had followed his parents there from his native Stollberg in eastern Germany, traveling with his grandmother and arriving in the Lehigh Valley in 1926, when he was 3 years old.

On their 47 acres in the Breinigsville section of Weisenberg, the Schmiedels kept chickens and grew peach and apple trees. Werner and his siblings had to help with the chores. On Sundays the family joined other Lutherans for worship at Ziegels Union Church. It was, for an ornery boy who quit school in eighth grade, a boring and tiresome existence.

Werner wanted his own way. He was hard to handle, his parents later said, causing them no end of grief. Twice he ran away from home. After the second time, when he was 17, he didn't come back. He turned up at Fort Knox, Ky., where the Army was building its force of tanks and other armored vehicles in response to the outbreak of war. Lying about his age, he enlisted for a three-year stint in June 1940 and joined a regiment that handled provisions and supplies.

After a year and a half, Schmiedel took off. He was caught four months later and held at Indiantown Gap Military Reservation in Lebanon County. Court-martialed on his return to Fort Knox, he was found guilty of going AWOL and sentenced to three months of hard labor.

Days later he showed his prickliness at a station hospital while being treated for a cold. A nurse described him as "quite boisterous," "very uncooperative" and "demanding various medications."

Assigned to the 90th Quartermaster Railhead Company, Schmiedel went AWOL from Camp Pickett, Va., in September 1942. Within a few weeks he was dropped from the rolls as a deserter. It was the sixth time he'd run off.

"The greatest fault my son Werner has, is that he lies too much, you can't believe him anything," his father wrote to the Army after being informed that his son had skipped out.

Schmiedel wasn't done causing headaches for the higher-ups, not by a long shot. Showing up in Philadelphia, he enlisted in the Army under a fake name, Robert Schmiedel, claiming no prior service. He was posted to a signal company at Camp Atterbury, Ind., but again couldn't stay put. He went AWOL by year's end, this time for three weeks.

Suspicions about his true identity led to a War Department investigation in the spring of 1943 that exposed him as a fraud. In a report signed by Director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI said Werner and Robert Schmiedel had identical fingerprints and thus were the same person. When confronted, Schmiedel claimed Werner was a brother who had deserted. The War Department said Robert was Werner and scratched his 1942 enlistment.

Schmiedel sneaked off yet again in the summer of 1943 during blackout maneuvers in Tennessee. It was the third time in eight months he'd gone AWOL.

As cantankerous as Schmiedel was, the Army needed foot soldiers on Europe's battlegrounds and sent him across the Atlantic as an infantry replacement at the end of the year. He shipped out on Christmas Eve from Camp Patrick Henry in Virginia, according to a statement he later gave criminal investigators.

"Prior to coming overseas, the only trouble I was ever in was going AWOL for short periods," he told them.

Molesting civilians

Schmiedel arrived at a replacement depot in Naples in late January 1944, just days after the Allied landings 135 miles to the north at Anzio, aimed at outflanking the Germans to beat a path to Rome.

Soon Schmiedel was back to his old tricks — AWOL from Feb. 21-25, the afternoon of Feb. 28, for six hours March 24, and from May 20 to June 2, when an MP caught him driving a stolen jeep. He was admitted to an Army station hospital for treatment of venereal disease, then locked up on his return to the replacement depot.

A few days later, he escaped from the guardhouse. He was back in custody after a woman called American authorities to report a soldier was attacking her daughter and had torn her dress. When an MP collared him, Schmiedel claimed to be an MP as well, dutifully rounding up Naples prostitutes. He was charged with assault, impersonating an MP, drunkenness, disorderly conduct and molesting Italian civilians.

Several days after being confined to a stockade, he dug a hole under a fence and escaped. He was caught more than a week later, again with a stolen jeep, and hospitalized for treatment of gonorrhea.

By this time, U.S. forces had taken control of war-ravaged Rome, which the Germans had abandoned. Schmiedel bolted again and was joined by two other American deserters, Tony Tavolieri and Jimmy Adams. The trio made easy money hijacking GI trucks loaded with cigarettes, flour and sugar between Naples and the ancient capital. In August, they rode to the outskirts of Rome in a stolen command car and pulled off a series of highway stick-ups, stealing money and watches from Italian civilians on bicycles.

In Rome the next day, they stole a jeep and held up more bicyclists at gunpoint, spent the night in the city and returned to Naples. Riding in a stolen weapons carrier (a light truck), and with Schmiedel wielding a Beretta pistol, they spent their days robbing civilians on the roads north of the city until mid-August, when the MPs caught up with Schmiedel. He was locked up and again hospitalized for venereal disease.

This time they had him, or so they thought. He was court-martialed for repeatedly going AWOL, sentenced to 20 years of hard labor and a dishonorable discharge, and confined to the U.S. Army stockade near Aversa, just north of Naples. Again he proved slippery. On Sept. 2, he escaped and fled to Naples, where he sold pilfered GI clothing for a few days before rejoining Adams and Tavolieri. The trio was about to embark on a crime wave.

On Sept. 7 at Sparanise, north of Naples, they stopped a vehicle carrying an Italian soldier, four other men and a boy, and robbed them at gunpoint. Adams and Tavolieri wore MP brassards and Schmiedel had sergeant's stripes, and all three showed Mauser pistols.

Ten days later, the chauffeur for Lt. Gen. Wladyslaw Anders, commander of the Polish Corps in Italy, was returning to Rome in the general's Cadillac after dropping him off in Naples. The sedan passed Schmiedel, Adams, Tavolieri, another American soldier and a 16-year-old Italian boy, Giovanni Cito, in their stolen weapons carrier near Capua. About 5:30 p.m., seeing easy money from a prize prey, Schmiedel pulled ahead of the Cadillac and Tavolieri got out, flashed a gun and forced the driver to stop.

Schmiedel wore master sergeant's stripes and carried a .45-caliber pistol and a Beretta. He, Adams and Cito drove the chauffeur a few miles in the weapons carrier and made him get out. They robbed him of four gold coins and other valuables worth $50. Schmiedel and Adams pointed pistols at his head and told him to go toward some bushes. As he walked backward, they kicked at him and beat him in the chest with their guns. He got down on his hands and knees and pleaded for his life, saying he had a wife and two children.

But then the driver broke away, zigzagging as he ran. A half-dozen shots rang out — two whizzed by his head. He got safely away.

Schmiedel, Adams and Cito rejoined Tavolieri and the other American, identified in court records only as Joe, who were in the Cadillac. Adams got into the car for a joy ride, but it didn't last. Tavolieri wrecked the car five miles down the road.

MacLean said the gang blundered in targeting the Polish general's car.

"When you rob the driver of a very, very high-ranking officer, you're going to get attention. They weren't hitting a farm truck with three sheep in the back. My guess is somebody with the MPs said, 'This is going too far. Put some more people on this case.' "

About 8:30 on the night of the carjacking, two MPs patrolling on motorcycles flagged down the weapons carrier near Formia, not sure what it was as it sped in the darkness. When they walked to the vehicle, Schmiedel and Adams put pistols to their backs. The MPs, fearing for their lives, gave up their brassards and pistols.

This growing violence on the highways made headlines. The GI newspaper Stars and Stripes reported that the crooks were led by "a swaggering, hoodlum-imitating farm boy" who went by the name Robert Lane, actually Schmiedel. He moved the headquarters of his Lane Gang — six American and two Canadian army deserters, and numerous civilian hangers-on — from Naples to Rome.

'Did I shoot?'

Rome had been battered for months by the Germans' occupation and the Allied effort to drive them out. In the fall of 1944, the city was still stumbling toward recovery. Allied deserters streamed in and lived in tucked-away places, posing as soldiers on permanent detail in the capital. The first two weeks of October saw 16 armed robberies in which the holdup men were described as soldiers wearing MP bands.

On the night of Oct. 9, Schmiedel, dressed as an MP sergeant, and Adams entered a wine shop at 223 Via Principe Amedeo run by Antonio Ferretti, his son and daughter-in-law. All three were there. Schmiedel and Adams looked around, and Schmiedel tried to open the cash drawer behind the counter, but it was padlocked. He and Adams remarked that some glasses were dirty and walked out.

The next day, a Tuesday, Schmiedel and Adams were in a restaurant across the Via Carlo Alberto from their favorite hangout, Rocky's Bar. They told another deserter they wanted to rob the little wine shop. All three walked four blocks to the place. Schmiedel and Adams asked the deserter to stand outside the door while they went in, but he refused, saying he didn't want any trouble. He walked up the street.

Eight Italians were in the shop when Schmiedel and Adams walked in about 8:30 p.m. with their guns drawn. Schmiedel wore an MP armband and sergeant's stripes, and carried a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. Adams, holding a Beretta, stood in front of the closed door. Schmiedel ordered the people to put up their hands and line up in front of the ice chest. Pointing his pistol at them, he told them to show their documents and put their wallets on a table. Adams started taking the wallets.

"Boys, show them your documents," Antonio Ferretti told his customers, thinking the soldiers were actually MPs.

When one customer took out his wallet and a few hundred lira notes showed, Adams snatched it. Ferretti turned to Schmiedel, "It's money you are after!"

Schmiedel went over to him, demanding his wallet.

"What am I going to give you? I have no money or documents," Ferretti said.

Schmiedel, who held MP gloves in his left hand, slapped him in the face with the gloves.

Jumping to the middle of the room, Schmiedel fired one shot. The bullet grazed a customer's head and hit Eolo Ferretti, Antonio's 44-year-old son, in the abdomen. He collapsed, crying out, "Dad, Dad!" His father went to him, laid a hand on him and saw it was covered with blood. He screamed.

Adams grabbed the remaining money and wallets on the table and stuck them in his shirt. He and Schmiedel backed to the door, then ran out. Eolo Ferretti, a father of two, died two hours later in a hospital.

"The next morning," Schmiedel later told Army criminal investigators, "Jimmy asked me why I shot in the wine shop the night before. … Also I found an empty cartridge in my revolver. I asked Jimmy, 'Did I shoot?' He said, 'Yes.' "

Capture and escape

Time magazine and Stars and Stripes reported on the first break in the case 10 days later. It came when Allied investigators questioned three deserters arrested after a jeep crash led to a shootout with MPs in Rome. The deserters revealed a Rome address used by the Lane Gang, and a search of the apartment turned up documents that had belonged to Eolo Ferretti.

The Special Investigation Branch of the British Army and the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division picked up stray members of the Lane Gang and learned it was planning to take an Italian civilian "for a ride," meaning he would be killed. Agents surrounded a Rome cafe and arrested four gang members as they arrived in a taxi. Among those nabbed was Adams.

The manhunt for Schmiedel — 6 feet tall and 155 pounds — intensified. Police got a photo of him on the sly from his Italian girlfriend, who never knew it was missing in the hour they'd had it. Copies were distributed across Rome and Naples.

Investigators in Naples called the CID office in Rome with a nugget of information. As a result, on the morning of Nov. 3, Agent Eugene Land was closely watching Rocky's Bar. As he walked along Via Carlo Alberto in civilian clothes, a soldier passed him going the opposite way.

Land glanced at the photo he kept in his pocket, turned around and followed the soldier into Rocky's. The bar was crowded. The soldier sat down at a table with two men and a girl and got a drink. Land sat at the bar and watched him in the mirror.

When the soldier took a swig, Land drew his gun, strode to the table and told Schmiedel to put his hands up. Surprised, Schmiedel didn't resist. From under Schmiedel's jacket, Land pulled out a loaded .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver — the weapon used in Eolo Ferretti's killing. In Schmiedel's pocket, he had just $18.

At the CID station in Rome, Schmiedel wrote a 12-page statement in which he said at one point, "I don't remember much of what happened in the wine shop. I don't imagine I got any money in there."

He and Adams' actual take? Little more than $15.

Schmiedel was hospitalized for treatment of gonorrhea and returned to a central MP station in Rome, awaiting transfer to a permanent stockade. But he, Adams and other prisoners hatched a plan to bust out.

About 2 a.m. Dec. 24, one of the hoodlums called to the jailers, saying he and two others needed to go to the latrine. One had a broken broom handle under his jacket, and Adams hid a foot-long stick. As a guard escorted them back to their cell, Adams pulled out the stick and smacked him in the head, knocking him out. They pushed him into the cell, where he was beaten with the broom handle.

Schmiedel and five other prisoners ran to the lockup's front office, where the other jailer had been, and caught him running toward their cell. They tackled him, took his .45-caliber pistol and clubbed him in the head.

MPs arrived and snared Adams, but Schmiedel, two of his henchmen and five other prisoners got away.

Schmiedel, who according to Stars and Stripes had vowed "I'll shoot any CID agent on sight," and another escapee were captured without incident two days later. The newspaper said British and American agents and MPs crashed through the door of a Rome apartment and found the pair cowering in a closet with their hair freshly bleached.

In February 1945, the U.S. Army charged Schmiedel and Adams with gunning down the wine shop owner's son, stealing from him and others in the shop, and robbing the Italians at Sparanise, the Polish general's driver and the two motorcycle MPs.

According to the charges, the pair "did … with malice aforethought, wilfully, deliberately, feloniously, unlawfully and with premeditation, kill one Eolo Ferretti, a human being, by shooting him with a pistol."

Schmiedel was also accused of going AWOL.

Adams, 23, of Roosevelt, Okla., and Schmiedel gave statements to an Army investigator that were later entered into the record of their court-martial. Adams said the wine shop holdup happened because he and Schmiedel were broke and "we decided to go out and rob an Italian somewhere." He said Schmiedel's gun went off by accident and the bullet ricocheted off the ice box before hitting the Italian.

In his statement, Schmiedel said he'd been "drinking rather heavy all afternoon and the early part of that evening. … I just got that Smith & Wesson gun that afternoon from an English fellow and I didn't know the operation of a .38. I was waving the gun around and somehow it went off accidently."

A psychiatric exam of Schmiedel found he was "emotionally slightly dull." The same Army doctor found "emotional instability" in Adams.

When a general court-martial convened March 26 at U.S. Army Headquarters in Rome, both defendants pleaded not guilty. Neither testified.

The next day, Schmiedel and Adams were convicted on all counts and sentenced "to be hanged by the neck until dead." They heard the verdict impassively as they stood without manacles before the court, in GI uniforms stripped of all insignia, the New York Times reported. (Hanging was for soldiers convicted of non-military crimes. Shooting was for those guilty of military offenses, such as desertion.)

An Associated Press story about the trial's outcome caught the attention of editors at The Evening Chronicle of Allentown. Schmiedel's parents learned of his fate from a Chronicle reporter sent to interview them. Gertrude Schmiedel, a mother of eight, stood on the porch of her farmhouse. She had worried a lot about her son Werner, she said, and felt he would eventually get into serious trouble.

Erich Schmiedel, Werner's father, was at his meat market and store near West Park in Allentown and told the reporter, "When we didn't hear from him for such a long time, I thought he might be in trouble."

That day's Chronicle story on Werner Schmiedel's disgrace sought to distance him from patriotic Americans, associating him with the Nazis. It referred to him in the opening sentence as "German-born Werner E. Schmiedel."

A few days later, his father wrote to Roosevelt, imploring the president to order a mental health examination of Werner.

"I have a feeling that he does not have the mental understanding and probably should be in a mental hospital rather than hung for a crime," he wrote.

He did not hear back from the White House.

'Judicial strangulation'

The death sentences were upheld on review, with one judge finding that "The course of conduct of the two accused until they were apprehended evinces a callous disregard of civil and military authority."

Adams would have to die even though he didn't pull the trigger, another judge asserted, because the wine shop robbery was "a joint enterprise."

But the commander of the Mediterranean Theater of Operations, Gen. Joseph T. McNarney, had the final say. He changed Adams' sentence to life in prison. Adams was sent to the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Union County, and later to one in Texas. Records show he was granted clemency and released in 1958. It's not clear whether he is still living.

On June 11, 1945, Schmiedel, once a private in the 2nd Replacement Depot, was executed at the U.S. Army's Peninsular Base Section stockade near Aversa, Italy. He was marched to the gallows, hands cuffed behind his back. The sentence of the Army court-martial was read to him. He appeared relatively calm, Stars and Stripes reported. A chaplain was there, and eight Army officers as witnesses.

Asked if he had any last words, Schmiedel said, "I know I have done wrong and I am willing to pay for it."

On the scaffold, a black hood was placed over his head, and the noose around his neck. The trap door was sprung at 8:17 a.m. Thirteen minutes later, an Army doctor pronounced him dead.

According to MacLean's book, "The Fifth Field," about the 96 American soldiers sentenced to death and executed in Europe and North Africa in World War II, Schmiedel was 79th. He was buried in the general prisoner plot at the U.S. Military Cemetery in Naples. In 1949, his remains were moved to the Oise-Aisne American Military Cemetery near Paris. They are in Grave 53, Row 3 in Plot E — an area called the Fifth Field, set aside for the remains of soldiers executed for their crimes.

On June 20, 1945, the Army wrote to Gertrude Schmiedel, saying her son had died in the Mediterranean Theater due to his "wilful misconduct," but did not say how. A confidential casualty report listed "judicial strangulation."

In anguish, her husband — a machine-gunner in the German army during World War I — wrote to the adjutant general's office in Washington, D.C., enclosing local newspaper clippings about Werner.

"I am really heartbroken but there is nothing I can do. According to the news in the Allentown Morning Call, my son … paid for his crimes by being hang[ed] … . I know that the United States army gave my son all the [chances] any soldier could have and I know that he really wasn't worth all that trouble. I have another son in the army over 21/2 years stationed … in Burma. He wears the bronze star and several honorable medals and I am proud of him.